Little Sister

Little Sister

In her own way, little sister Achu drives her little brother Abhi away from her. Firstly, she is very possessive of everything around her. If she is sitting in my lap and she sees Abhi around, she will continue to sit in my lap for as long as she could, because she doesn’t want Abhi to sit in my lap. Once she saw Abhi crawling towards me and hurriedly ran towards me and sat in my lap. 🙂 Last week, she screamed because she didn’t want nanny to feed Abhi (that was new, btw. 🙂 ). This morning, she saw Abhi drinking his milk laying down in my lap, she wanted it that way too. With toys, its like everything is hers. Even if Abhi is holding the toy and if she didn’t want the same toy a moment ago, she will grab it from him. She takes books away from him and just throws them away. No reason, really. And there are other endless things she does which have made Abhi stay away from her. 🙂 But, in her own way, she already knows that she can play with Abhi. She tries to copy everything he does. It seems to me like she learns more from him than what she learns from us. She pays more attention to what Abhi is doing always. Sometimes, she tries to engage him in a peekaboo play or wants him to chase her. Abhi doesn’t acknowledge this all much. It’s not quite working yet, but, slowly they are getting there. Important thing is Achu keeps trying to include Abhi in her play or asks for his help. 🙂

* When we were in Hyderabad, pooja room was one of their favorite places. As long as the door to the pooja room was open and my dad is doing pooja, both Abhi and Achu are stationed outside the little room, doing their best to sneak in, trying to take things away etc. This was their morning routine everyday, for few weeks. One morning, by the time they expected the door to be open, it wasn’t. So they went ahead and got themselves busy in other things. Someone walks in, opens the pooja room door and Achu notices that. She quickly crawls to the door (they weren’t walking then), gets ready to do her things and realizes Abhi wasn’t there. She goes back to living room, looks at Abhi, points to the open door. That was her telling him that the pooja room door was open now. 🙂 Next second, both of them were crawling towards the room to play there.

* Abhi and Achu are in their Disneyland aka our bedroom. We have come to the point where we spell B-E-D-R-O-O-M than just say the word, because once they hear the word, they want to go in and play there. They act super excited in this room, rushing from one corner to other. Touching few things or saying no tataa (no touchey) for few. One thing, they play with is the humidifier. According to Abhi and Achu, anything unplugged needs to be plugged in. So they both sit next to the humidifier and make every effort to plug it in. And since, that’s not safe, I plugged in a plug cover into the socket. The next time, Achu was in trouble. She could no longer plug it in. So what does the little sister do? Runs to her brother and brings him back to the humidifier to let him know of the situation. Together, they sit, start scraping the plug cover with their little nails. Thankfully, they didn’t succeed then. 🙂 But, later, they managed it.

* Next time, Achu has decided to open her dad’s backpack. Now, the problem was she doesn’t know what to do with the zips on the bag. She tries to jiggle it for few seconds. It doesn’t work. So, again, she goes and lets Abhi know of her problem. It’s so surprising to see Achu not say anything, and yet Abhi understands that she needs something. Abhi also comes back to the bag, and both of them try to open the backpack.

* Murali and I are in the kitchen while Abhi and Achu are playing in the tunnel. I didn’t even realize they were playing with each other there. I thought they were just doing things on their own, like most of the times. Suddenly, Abhi starts to laugh out loud. I don’t know what happened, but the little sister managed to do something that made Abhi laugh. Abhi continued to laugh for few seconds while Achu continued with her silly acts. 🙂

* It wouldn’t be right if I only wrote the instances where Achu is the trying to play with Abhi and Abhi isn’t responding well. Sometimes, this little sister becomes the smart sister and gets what she wants .When she realizes that taking a toy away from Abhi will mean she will be made to return it, she devises smart ways to get what she wants. Imagine, Abhi had a toy (or phone) she badly wants now just because Abhi has it :). Instead of grabbing it from him, she tricks him. Or treats him. She will pick other toys or interesting things from the box and drops it in front of him. She will put every toy in front of him until Abhi decides to want the new toy. When Abhi wants the new toy, he leaves what he has now, takes the other one. Mission accomplished for Achu. She gets what she wanted. 🙂 The first time, she did it, I couldn’t believe she really did this. More times we saw her do something this, we saw she was really tricking Abhi. Of course, we took whatever she was getting this way, away from her, so she stopped doing this. I guess, she is cooking smarter ways now. 🙂

Little brother Abhi is still busy in his own world, doing his favorite things, learning in his way. I cant wait to see him reciprocate to his little sister. Hopefully that will be soon.